Posted
on December 6, 2014
Babar
the Elephant was a family creation.
And
today's famous birthday, Jean de Brunhoff, was the father of that
family.
Once
upon a time, a French artist named Jean married a pianist named
Cecile. They had two little boys, Mathieu and Laurent. And one day
Mathieu was sick and uncomfortable. His mommy did what so many other
mommies have done, over the years: she distracted him from his misery
by telling a story.
In
Cecile's story, a little elephant named Babar left the jungle and
traveled to a city. The two boys loved their mother's story so much
that they asked their father to paint pictures of Babar and the other
characters. And soon the first Babar picture book, The Story of
Babar, was written and illustrated.
Now,
it just so happened that the de Brunhoff family ran a publishing
business. The plan was to publish the picture book with the words
“told by Jean and Cecile de Brunhoff,” but Cecile insisted that
her name be taken off. Many people know that she created the premise
and characters (at least) of the story, and they sometimes refer to
boy Jean and Cecile as the authors, but the actual book has been
attributed to only Jean (again, at her request).
Jean
de Brunhoff (born on this date in 1899) wrote and illustrated six
more Babar books, but he died from tuberculosis when he was just 37
years old! What a shame!
Still,
the Babar books went on. How did that happen?
Jean's
brother Michel de Brunhoff oversaw the publishing of Jean's last two
books, which had only been illustrated in black and white. Michel
arranged for artists to color the illustrations with paint, and he
had Laurent (Jean's older son) do some of the painting. At that point, Laurent was 13 years old.
Another
publishing house soon bought the rights to the Babar books and
reprinted all seven of them. Millions of copies were sold all around
the world.
World
War II happened, and it interrupted many things – including in
France, which was occupied by Nazi forces for four years. So it is
not, perhaps, so very surprising that when a new Babar book came out
after the war, most readers thought that the six-year gap between
books was due to the war! (Many readers didn't notice that the first name of the author was different, and they were unaware of Jean's untimely death.)
The real reason for the 6-year gap was that Laurent was busy growing up. As a young adult, he ended up adopting his father's style of painting elephants and writing more Babar books. He said that it was a way of keeping
the memories of his father and of his own childhood alive!
 |
| Laurent is an old man now. |
To
celebrate Jean de Brunhoff, read Babar books, explore the
crafts and other activities at Babar-dot-com, have fun with
Babar's Painting Game and Picnic Game, and check out the Disney Junior Babar games.
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on this date:
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